Last Magic With Angel Boy: Part One

His specific kind of chips, Aldi version. I spoiled Angel Boy and I'm so glad.

The last time Angel Boy came over, I got into a princess costume right away, just because. He let me pick out a dress for him to wear as well. I wish you could see how beautiful he was. I wish I had taken more pictures, darn me being so present and in-the-moment!

After our politics/I love yous adventure, I wanted Angel Boy and I to really talk, so I tried this dice game that worked before, with The Shy One. When I proposed the idea, he seemed so excited, but by the night of the date, he had forgotten. He just wanted to watch Adventure Time and cuddle, but he got into the game pretty quickly. He said I was glad I'd thought of it, he really didn't know how to talk about any of that stuff.

I knew I was codependent-ing, trying to run the whole connection on my own because I sensed that no forward motion would come from his end. Being an artist and a codependent, I feel like I can sometimes conjure whole relationships one-sidedly, carry them along on my own momentum and effort until the resentment and inertia become too much, never knowing what's real or mutual. Also though, I have Relationship OCD, so not knowing what's real or mutual is part of my day-to-day life.

The plan for the evening, after we talked, was birthday spanks! We'd joked that I would get 204 spanks, 52 on each cheek with hands, then flogger. His flogger looked a little flimsy, but I looked forward to it with delight anyway. I've been woefully unspanked the last few birthdays, oh no!

But first, episodes. It took us a while to figure out where we'd left off in our Adventure Time viewing, but we landed on one that featured a surprising amount of spanking for a kids' show! The coziness between us was swift and thorough, bonded on the couch like the little pack animals that we are.

I asked if I could sit at his feet and put my head on his knee, and he said yes. I spread out a blanket on the floor and settled into a beatific pink glow, a magic stillness. I asked to make sure my tiara wasn't poking him. My pink tutu felt dreamy but not surreal, just me being me. He scritched my head in a rhythm that suggested he was either really in the groove or absent-minded, who's to say.

Angel Boy described himself as a Soft Daddy Dom (on reflection, he's actually none of those things) and I felt it. Though I was a ways away from being able to use the D-word with him, I felt it in my heart. I felt charmed, cherished, and safe. I felt right-size in the universe, insignificant and awed. The peace between us was thick and soporific, there'd be no spanks tonight.

Princess of Livid

Bridesmaid dresses were kind of wild back then!
Or maybe the ladies in my family are just weirdos?

 It seems like the dumbest thing I've ever been mad about, but I think it's important. Week before last, on a Sunday morning, I was figuring out what to say to Mr. Breakfast and feeling jangled about some other stuff, when I heard The Guy Next Door talking in baby voice to whoever his date was:

"...and I treat her like a princess. I treat you like a princess, too. No fetish is ever gonna..."

Now, I'm pretty lucky for someone who lives next door to her onerous unrequited kryptonite crush. I've only run into him once since our break-off conversation, and I don't overhear anything blush-inducing. I almost always have white noise or music on, there's only just a sliver of space where I can hear anything at all. But there he was in that sliver of space. I wasn't eavesdropping, I just heard it.

I'm sure he wasn't saying it for me to hear, he was just saying stuff. I know him well enough that I'm pretty sure he's not treating anyone like a princess, but that's not how it landed.

The message my tangled heart heard was that I wasn't good enough, that other women deserved to be treated like princesses and I'd failed some mysterious test. This is one of my oldest and loudest and most destructive intrusive thoughts: "You're not as good as other women, they know something you don't and can't know."

Why my brain appointed him the designated arbiter of my worth is a question for infinite Codependents Anonymous meetings, but in that moment, I felt like I winked out of existence, the woozy, drowning feeling of being not there. If they were the princesses, if they had somehow gained his fleeting and sand-castle-like attention, then there was no reason for there to be a me at all. 

(How am I ever supposed to date men when I have thoughts like that? Makes me want to get myself to some kind of non-denominational anti-Fascist nunnery where I could garden and call congress and read books and forget that men ever were.)

He wasn't saying it for me to hear, but he knew it was a pet name I loved. I'd showed him my Feeld profile mentioning being a princess. (In fact, when he read the part about me looking for a sweet dom who's good with ropes, he said "Well you found him." That motherfucker could really SAY STUFF.)

Anyway, the morning of the overhearing, I was LIVID. I'M the princess, goddammit, how could he take even that away from me?

(The 30 Rock joke about "sexually transmitted crazymouth" comes to mind, although I guess it was transmitted via weird nebulous friendship instead.)

(Semi-platonically transmitted crazymouth?)

Anyway, it made me want to think about why the word "princess" feels so important to me.

I remember a moment, not too long after my teenage sexual assault, dressed up for Halloween in the above bridesmaid dress and looking in the mirror. The lipstick I'd just applied looked like clown makeup to me. All of me felt false, artificial, foolish, absent. I had some nerve dressing up as a princess, I was barely even a woman. I was barely even anything. I wiped the makeup off but wore the dress.

The next time I wore that dress, I was in my very early twenties and part of an art happening. My project was to create a pink-themed pyramid of everything about me, and let people take home anything that spoke to them. A stranger went home with a box of my love letters and I can't say I regret this choice! My brother got livid with me because I gave away the Barbie he'd given me the Christmas before.

After the show, when most of the pink pyramid was gone, I felt empty but also less alone. If I couldn't figure out how to be close to people, at least I could get them to take a piece of me home.

After that night, the friend who ran the art show started calling me Princess (My Name)--he even wrote a song about me! I LOVED being Princess Me. These were my raver years and also my shoplifting-at-my-friends'-mall-stores years, so I was never without shiny too-short dresses, manic panic hair, and Urban Decay makeup. And glitter. So, SO much glitter. And sometimes bubbles that were also candy. It was a magical time.

One time a guy I flirted with at the coffeehouse told me I looked like I was from space, and that felt like the highest compliment.

Between the mid-Nineties and whenever I made my Feeld profile, the Princess persona got less plasticky, but never lost its glitter. It morphed from a costume to a gender expression, a femme way of fiercely, adamantly claiming womanhood in a world that was never gonna declare me to be womaning properly.

Calling myself a princess was a way to give myself what I felt like no one else was ever gonna give me, a way to treat myself like a magical treasure, the way I saw (or more likely imagined) other, smaller, quieter, more conventionally beautiful women being valued, being attended to. It was a way to attend to myself, a skill I'm still trying to learn.

In the weeks following my unfortunate overhearing, I have been treated so, SO kindly. 

For example:

Sweet Valentine: What song is this?

Me: I Wanna Be Adored by The Stone Roses.

Sweet Valentine: And you are!

I've been treated kindly by my friends, too, and my Higher Power, and by the gently-thawing weather. And most importantly, by myself. People are welcome to join me in my princess-ness, but I have to treat myself that way, and keep doing it.

Right in this moment, I feel the truth: No one can decide whether I'm a princess, or any other pet name, except me. Right now, I feel like I'm up to the challenge of self-love.

Perfect Birthday Date with The Shy One, Part One

 

(I’m behind on my cuteness reporting—this date was two weeks ago.)

(Right now, The Shy One is getting ready for a spouses' trip wherein it’s likely he’ll/they'll hook up with a friend. In my head, (I know almost nothing about her) she is the perfect unicorn and will definitely negate any future need for me. He has taken great care to assure me that that won’t be the case, (the negating, I mean) and the assurance means a lot, but still. It’s a vulnerable moment to be paragraphing about him, or maybe the perfect moment. They haven’t invented that turn-me-into-a-compersion-robot-for-the-weekend technology yet, so I’m doing my best to love myself through the complicated-but-mostly-just-rooting-for-him fraughtness.)

Now for the fancy date story! Although, as we’ve established, I see myself as Upstairs in the Downton sense, I’ve never seen myself as someone who could be taken on a fancy date. Sweetie-Now-BFF and I have treated ourselves from time to time, but being taken out someplace by a man? That’s movies, not me. So when The Shy One picked a fancy steakhouse downtown to celebrate my birthday, I was completely dazzled and pretty intimidated.

I had weeks to prepare/make myself nervous. I spent a good chunk of time scrolling through purple dresses online and I found the perfect one: long, gauzy, royal purple, with a thick satin ribbon at the empire waist. The shop had it labeled “mother of the bride” but to me, it was a princess dress. It came right away and fit perfectly, just like a shipping fairy tale.

Then, on a solo mini-vacation in an artsy mountain town, I found just the right baubly necklace at a flea market for three dollars! And a pretty beaded mauve purse at a vintage shop that looked like the inside of the B-52s collective mind. I hadn’t bought a specific purse for a specific reason since my wedding nineteen (!) years ago. It was like Artsy Mountain Town was playing the role of fairy godmother.

Purse-buying aside, I tried (unsuccessfully) not to get too carried away about this date. I was a little overwhelmed and self-conscious, had even a little trouble feeling worthy. This is a thing I run into a lot these beautiful, romantic days—how is this happening to actual me?! A year ago, I couldn’t even get The Coach to come fuck me in person!

When the Friday night of the date arrived, I felt so gorgeous that I texted my closest neighbors to see if they could come take my picture. I ran into them out front and posed for the camera while I waited for my Lyft.

I never went to the prom (My date, the prettiest hippie girl in any given mosh pit, got scared to go because we’d been targeted a bully lacrosse player girl a few times. I had the perrrrrfect dress picked out for that night too though, fresh from the Thrifty Shopper. It was pink polyester with long floaty, translucent sleeves that had sparkly buttons at the cuffs. Someone had sewn it by hand, and there was a same-pink-fabric triangle sewn in at the neckline. A little on the nose. I wore that dress A LOT in my late teens/ early 20s. You may or may not remember that disco had a Nineties revival.) but this 2022 birthday moment was a little taste of what prom might have felt like.

When the car pulled up in front of the restaurant, I saw The Shy One and said to the Lyft driver “Right here. Oh my goodness, look at him.”

He was wearing a light blue dress shirt and, in his pocket, had perfectly matched blue shades. He looked as nervous as I felt, and we went inside.

As she led us to our table, the hostess asked, “Do you have any plans after this?” and I could not find it in me to be a normal person in that moment and just say “No, not really!” and deflect the question. But we DID have plans afterwards, and all I could picture was my new royal purple set of ropes.

“…Sort of?” I said, giggling and trying to stifle a huge smile.

“Do I want to know? She asked, leading us up the formal staircase to our booth on the mezzanine.

“Probably not!” I giggled some more.

OMG These Presents.

Please note that this box was sealed with red heart stickers.

The last time I had a boyfriend, (“Fiancé” actually, but that just seems bananas.) I’d just turned twenty-one. That’s twenty-six years ago and even then, it felt unreal. When girls-then-women liked me, that made sense, but I had a deep down understanding that a guy would never like me romantically. In fact, my mom, during my teenage years or maybe early adulthood told me “I guess no one will ever love us.” when I was fretting about some unrequited thing or other. I don’t know why my brain A. Took this pronouncement as irrefutably true and B. Decided she just meant men. Trauma? Abuse? Some warped loyalty to mom? Bi erasure? All of those things?

So it was easy to believe it when my first girlfriend and I got close, and my marriage to BFF-Formerly-Sweetie made all the sense in the world, except when it didn’t. The three young men who various-amounts-of-loved-me in my teen years felt a universe away almost immediately, framed in my mind as important but always destined to be lost. (Two of the three were very not gone, it turned out, until stupid jerk covid took Pagan Boy away last year.)

This persistent disbelief about male attraction wasn’t about fat. I’ve always (well, mostly always) seen myself as beautiful. It just felt like other women knew how to be with men, the secret code words or something. As you know by now, I’ve evolved unrequited affection into one of my most central art mediums, at least as formative to my soul as watercolors or photography.

In eighth grade, the school sold carnations for Valentine’s Day, pink, red, and white. (I am Tina Belcher, hear me roar.) I so much wanted to be a getter-of-flowers, to be seen by a crush or by anybody. I mooned and cried at the lunch table. Then a guy at the next table, an acquaintance’s big brother, gave me one pink carnation, stemless and clearly regifted. I don’t know if it was a kindness or a low-key prank, but either way he never talked to me again.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow was incredibly generous. Perfectly 1993 Guy and Pagan Boy sent mixtapes long after we weren’t together. Oh boy the late nights up late with the Stone Roses and that Jane’s Addiction b-side, like, how is this an EX’s mixtape, with all the “I wanna be adored” and “I would for you…”

Before I get derailed looking up more Nineties deep cuts, let me finally get to the point:

Last Monday, The Shy One showed up for our immediately-post-Ramadan date beautiful and a little nervous-seeming and still masked from the Uber-ride. With a gift bag that said “Enjoy every moment!” on it. Flowery lotions and perfume. Bright, perfectly-fruit-scented candles. An electric wine opener I absolutely did not need but will now keep forever. And this cup and spoon:

I can't even.

Seriously, DO YOU SEE THE SPOON?! That’s what I’ve been picturing this week as I gently guide my mind away from Gilead-themed draft opinion panic. That spoon just exists a little more than other objects do, like the Hope Diamond does, like my magenta ropes do.

It’s not just the presents, of course, that inspired me to ask him to be my boyfriend by the end of the night. I’m feeling private for now about all the superhot parts, but maybe I’ll get them down sometime soon. Like the meditation-inspiring spoon, all the gifts felt grounding, somehow both lavishly romantic and straightforwardly attuned to what’s real. Like him. There’s such a solidity to his affection, an uncomplicated generosity, an ease. The Shy One does for my spirit what the ropes do for my body. I don’t really know how to be a boyfriend’s girlfriend, but he makes me feel brave enough to try.